Rational Quality Manager is based on the Jazz™ platform (http://jazz.net and http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/jazz/) and inherits many characteristics from that platform. Rational Quality Manager is designed to be used by test teams of all sizes and supports a variety of user roles, such as test manager, test architect, test lead, tester, and lab manager, as well as roles outside the test organization.
A test plan that you define in Rational Quality Manager drives activity for distributed teams through all phases of the project lifecycle. The test plan defines the objectives and scope for the test effort and contains criteria to help teams determine the answer to the question "Are we ready to release?"
The test plan can be configured to meet the needs of your organization. You can use the test plan to do any and all of the following tasks:
Rational Quality Manager provides a full-featured manual test editor. You can also import existing manual test scripts from Rational Manual Tester. You can add reuse and automation capabilities to your manual tests by using keywords.
With Rational Quality Manager, you can manage and execute test scripts created with tools such as Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester, Rational Robot, Rational Service Tester for SOA Quality, and Rational AppScan Tester Edition.
You can also import test artifacts from external test management solutions, such as Rational ClearQuest Test Manager and Rational TestManager.
Rational Quality Manager includes several standard test reports to help you evaluate test results. Reports are available through all phases of the test process.
You can use reports to:
Rational Quality Manager makes it easy to share information with other members of your team. The Jazz-based work item system allows team members to assign tasks and defects to each other and to view everyone's status. Test plan authors and test case designers can distribute their work for review and track the status of each reviewer. New and changed requirements are visible to the team, as are the test cases that are needed to satisfy those requirements. Team members are notified automatically of any changes and milestones that impact their work.
In addition, test plan, test case, and test script authors can place a lock on their artifacts to prevent others from editing them.
Rational Quality Manager provides lab management capabilities that allow you to create requests for the test environments specified in your test plan. You can then work with the lab manager to ensure that lab resources and test environments are available when needed. Lab managers can track all lab resources from a centralized resource repository and service requests from the test team.
Rational Quality Manager helps IT and security professionals protect against the threat of attacks and data breaches through its integration with Rational AppScan Tester Edition. Security testing for your Web applications can result in higher-quality, more secure applications at a reasonable cost.
Rational Quality Manager helps ensure that your business processes comply with industry, corporate, and departmental standards and regulations. Throughout the testing life cycle, Rational Quality Manager provides you with the tools to obtain an up-to-the-minute measurement of software quality and project metrics. With its comprehensive test plan and integration with requirements management and defect tracking tools, Rational Quality Manager helps streamline your test strategy and produce reliable records of test results and project history.